‘Vicky’ lets sex do the talking

"Vicky Cristina Barcelona" is a neatly balanced tale of a carefully balanced menage a trois among people with unbalanced libidos, fluctuating interests and roving eyes.

It is as colorful a portrait of a scenically voluptuous spot no one will be able to afford to travel to again as "Mamma Mia!" and just as in love with its titular host city as the Beijing Olympics.

Sex sells, and when you have sex gods like Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson on the screen, there is no reason to mention Woody Allen's name in the TV ads.

But in fact this is classic, vintage new-tradition Allen. "Match Point," "Cassandra's Dream" and now "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," as it is known, are the familiar complexities of his early works made into austere inquiries about his recurring themes.

The first two, about death, were told in a cold and hard un-ironic pentameter.

But the new one is about sex, and its body language is as musical and alluring as the sun-splashed modern port city that it celebrates. A comparison to Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar is inevitable, partly because of its sensual barometric pressure, partly because Cruz starred in "Volver," which Allen said was the only Almodóvar film he'd seen, and partly for the outdoor flamenco scene that looks note for note like the one in "Talk to Her."

But that film was about grief. This one is about seduction.

Johansson and Rebecca Hall are, respectively, a blond Betty and brunet Veronica, two young American friends in Barcelona with different wants and needs. Hall is practical and engaged to a dependable yuppie, but Johansson is brazen and experimental. She is looking for adventure and finds it in the primitive and passionate Bardem, a moody artist who divorced his wife, played by Cruz, when she tried to stab him.

His offer to sleep with the two women is frank and insulting but comes without strings and is fraught with possibility. Hall gets huffy but Johansson is game, and so begins a contact sport among consenting adults that they all play by different rules.

Johansson is a pleasure seeker with a short attention span, Hall protesteth too much, and Cruz reappears to destabilize everyone's lives. But Bardem is man enough for all of them. For a time, Cruz, Johansson and Bardem make beautiful music together, until reality raises its discordant little head. And while Hall seems like the odd one out, she plays sexual musical chairs her own way.

The film is funny, full of ideas and accessorized with great looking scenery, human and otherwise. The magical and transient nature of this "Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" meets "Sex and the City" is reinforced by omniscient voiceover narration that adds an "as told to" fairy tale quality to events.

As with Allen's other recent films, it is narratively terse, and perhaps this development suggests the impatience of a prolific 72-year-old filmmaker who has stories to tell, but for whom time is running out to tell them. Like Clint Eastwood, Allen is becoming more interesting with age.